In-house is cheaper: Radical’s audio investment

Radical Entertainment, well-known for making immersive games, is working to …

As time goes by, an increasing number of parallels between video games and films are drawn. It's not surprising, given the way that game technology keeps improving, that Radical Entertainment is now taking things one step further by utilizing THX/Neural 7.1 surround sound in their game production; this is the same type of surround sound used for film releases.

Radical recently built a $300,000 post-production audio studio to mix its sounds, a move that was inspired when the developer had to travel down to Skywalker Sound in order to remix the audio for Scarface: The World Is Yours. According to the Vancouver Sun, Iain Ross—the man who runs Radical's sound department—decided to construct the studio because, "Skywalker was expensive, and for the cost of one trip to Skywalker we managed to build our own studio."

Up until this point, Radical had some smaller sound studios that were capable of performing 5.1 channel mixing. The developer still uses them to test out the 7.1 channel audio versions of its games on consumer systems; while some households have 7.1 speaker systems, 5.1 systems are becoming fairly common in home entertainment setups. The new studio is currently being used by Radical Entertainment to handle the sound for its (potentially amazing) sci-fi/action game, Prototype, as well as Crash Bandicoot: Mind Over Mutant.